BBC: Tom Burke you have advised the British government on climate change for lots of difficult decisions, balancing both the needs of industry and the effect on ordinary people. What do you make of the draft.
Tom Burke: I think that what’s really important about this draft, much more than the specifics or the text, is the direction of travel that it outlines, it now makes it really clear that we are at a turning point. We are moving away from a world that depended on high carbon energy for its energy supplies, and is now moving, and is going to move further and faster than anybody would have thought of before this agreement, toward a low-carbon economy based on energy efficiency and more use of renewables. So I am quite positive about where we have got to.
If after the disaster at Copenhagen, which was the last big climate summit, you had said that within five years China was going to have agreed to peak its emissions and the G7 countries were going to have agreed to decarbonise their economies by the end of the century, people would have thought that you were mad. Well if that’s the result you got from a failure, what do you think you are going to get from a success. I think people everywhere now are beginning to see this as a success.